Bon nadal

Catalan Christmas has a distinct theme running through it - and, well, there's no easy way to say this to a British audience, it's shit.

The Catalans are very proud of their scatalogical Christmas culture and our Catalan friends have spent quite a bit of time talking to us about it.

Catholics like their nativity scenes, but if you look carefully at a Catalan version (pessebre) you might well spot the figure of a little man squatting in the corner with his trousers down. He is a caganer. Often it's a peasant-like figure, but sometimes it's a famous person such as a politician. There's one in the window of one of the butchers in our village.

The village butcher's caganer making his deposit, left

There are lots of theories about why the caganer has appeared (just Google it), but most people just seem to think it's quite funny.

This evening Catalan children will be singing to the caga tió (shit log) which - after it's been hit with a stick a few times - will then poo out some presents for them.

Caga tió: might not be so cheerful after being hit
with sticks by small children all evening

You can watch Stephen Fry chuckling about Catalan Christmas on QI...

Mucho viento

When the British think of Spain it's often a Mediterranean sun, sea and sand-scape. We remember sunburnt August package holidays but have little understanding of what the weather is like during the rest of the year.

Here in Catalunya, we get the intense heat of the summer, but there is so much more weather too.

When the wind blows here it really means it. It roars through the trees, howls down our chimney and throws the bin around (if we leave it in a foolish place). A strong north-westerly has been blowing since Saturday without much let-up ("Siempre viento in este país," said the man in the garden centre this morning), and last night was the fiercest so far.

When I'm awake and listening to the wind at 4 o'clock in the morning it seems as though every gust will be followed by a bang or a crash as a tree snaps, something falls from the house or the car takes off. But when the sun comes up and I look out of the window everything is as it was. The pine trees simply seem to bend to the force (think of wibbly Van Gogh cypresses) and each patch of olive trees on the hillside turns into a pool of shimmering green waves as the leaves are flipped over and back, catching the sunlight on the way.

Our little house nestles into the southerly side of the hill so we're often protected from the worst blasts. Sometimes the wind can be tearing away behind us while we enjoy the sun on the porch, not feeling a whisper.

On the plus side, a nice steady north wind gets our wind turbine spinning happily. Right now we're getting about 6 amps from the turbine and when the sun's out too there's actually too much energy generated for the power system to use - even if the fridge is on, the laptop is charging and the TV is being watched.

But the wind is wearing - it makes the puppy hyper, dries out my skin and stops us all from sleeping. I hope it calms down soon.

More veggie thoughts

We were kept awake for much of last night by high winds roaring through the forest, howling down our chimney and throwing around our dustbin.

At one point - possibly between pondering whether the puppy could actually be swept off the porch and listening to The Now Show podcast - I thought of a few more veggie in Spain things. (See previous post here for more.)

• At a Spanish wedding David was served nothing but a plate of lettuce; and the waiters came out to look at him.

• We once ordered huevas at a restaurant instead of huevos. These were small grey sausages of squashed together fish eggs. They weren't nice.

• Champis are delicious little snacks served at some bars in the north of Spain. (We've had them in Zaragoza and Bilbao.) They are mushrooms fried in oil, chilli and cider speared onto a piece of bread with a toothpick.

• Even gazpacho can be fraught with risk for a vegetarian. Eateries with ambition serve it with some tiny pieces of chopped up pig (plus perhaps boiled egg, onion and pepper) - for extra flavour, of course. (David makes a very good gazpacho with chilli croutons.)

A veggie in Spain

Reading this post about being a vegetarian in Spain on the Tales from Toriello blog by Ian and Luis made me chuckle.

My husband David is a vegetarian and we face exactly the same challenge - the fact that most bars and restaurants in Spain don't cater for, understand or want to acknowledge the existence of vegetarians. (I love eating meat and fish, but enjoy cheese and bean-based dishes too, which is fortunate for our marriage.)

We've never been able to enjoy one of the super bargainous menus del dia (a three-course meal, usually at lunchtime, for 10 euros or thereabouts) that you get in such a lot of restaurants in Spain as there's never a vegetarian option. (I do feel a bit put-out about this.)

In a strange city, we'll frequently opt for an Italian restaurant as we know that there will be some choice for Vegetarian Husband.

And, like Ian and Luis, we know that a tortilla de patatas is often the best (and only) way forward. (As long as there's no random bits of pig thrown in for 'extra flavour'.) Patatas bravas, patatas ali-oli and pa amb tomaquet (bread rubbed with garlic and tomato, with olive oil and salt - a Catalan speciality) are also useful - but not necessarily balanced - stand-bys.

Olive toil

The olive harvest is just coming to an end here. Around the start of November we began to glimpse vast dark green collection nets spread out on the hillsides between the silvery olive trees. As we sat outside a bar enjoying a cold beer in the evening, carfulls of tired, dirty people would pass with sacks bulging with the tiny fruits to join the queue for one of the village's olive presses.

Spain is the world's largest olive producer (see Wikipedia) and there are certainly a lot of olive trees around here. In London, olives and their oil were, to us, an expensive delicacy. But here they are trodden underfoot, we can buy big bottles of luscious, yellowy-green oil for not very much money at all, and quite a few people can't even be bothered to pick their crop as they've got too much left over from the year before.

As it's our first year we were keen to carry out a harvest from the trees on our land and get our own olive oil pressed. We've been anxiously watching the fruits grow all year, wondering whether a green olive would turn into a black olive (it did - via purple) and waiting for an indication that the time was right to begin the harvest. (Some magic meteorological moment determines when the olives are at exactly the right stage of oiliness, wateriness and not-greenness.)

Olive blossom in May

Olives ripening in early September

One warm sunny day towards the end of November, when most of our olives were soft and purply-black, and after our immediate neighbours had picked theirs, we decided to begin. David had been watching the neighbours work their harvest and had picked up some good tips and one of our friends arrived to show us what to do. Our land doesn't have huge amounts of olive trees (although it did once: there are enormous holes in the ground where old olive trees were dug out for some reason, possibly to sell), so we had agreed with another neighbour to pick their olives too. To have our own oil pressed at the Moli d'oli in the village we would need a minimum of 300kg.

We started by clearing the land as much as we could underneath the trees. The flatter and cleaner it is, the easier it is to spread out the huge net which will catch the olives. Where there were slopes (most of our land is sloping, in spite of the terraces) we caught the edge of the net on some low branches to stop all the olives rolling off down the hill. (NB, we learned that it's better not to have a small puppy running around at this time because she will charge right underneath the net and it will be rather difficult to extract her from the tangle.)

David demonstrating how to lay out an olive net
Koko about to undo all the good work

When the nets are ready, it's time to pick the olives. We were lucky that most of our trees have been pruned into a low wide shape so that we could reach most of the branches easily. In our right hand we held our chosen harvesting tool – an olive comb – and in our left we grabbed on to a branch of the tree and pulled it towards us. Then we scraped the comb as hard as we could through the leaves and pulled off the olives which bounced on to the nets below our feet. (This isn't as difficult or as unpleasant as picking carobs.)

An olive comb

An olive comb in action

Some people use mechanical tree shakers. In fact someone is using one right now in the valley below our house. It sounds like a strimmer – they're petrol-driven – and they vibrate the branches really hard so that the olives fall off (you can't really do this with your own strength – we tried). They probably make the job a lot quicker and easier, but some people say that they damage the tree.

Once we'd finished a tree, we had to herd the olives off the net and into a tub, making sure that we didn't flick up the wrong bit of net and see all our hard work tumble off down the hillside.

Some of our crop

After half a day's work it became clear that we weren't going to get enough for an oil pressing, which was a disappointment. Although word in the village is that it's a bad year for olives (not enough rain, wrong kind of wind, who knows?) we're holding out high hopes for next year. But we continued for the rest of the day and decided that we'd cure them ourselves. Update on the results coming soon.

Eco-conquering the washing machine: part two

I've been using Ecoballs with mixed results in the washing machine. (See part one for background to this post.)

In their favour, they massively cut down water and energy use. I've been running the first part - the washing part - of the cycle as usual off the generator. (We tried the heating-the-water part directly from our off-grid system, but got scared when it started sucking more than 100 amps of power out, so switched it back over to the genny.)

Then, as the Ecoballs say they don't need a rinse cycle, when this first part is finished (after about half an hour) I stop the machine, turn off the generator, plug the machine into the wall (so it's running off the solar and wind) and flick the dial around to the final rinse and spin, thereby missing out two rinses and another half hour or so of washing machine churning.

So, by doing this, I've halved the water used and cut the use of the generator by about 60 per cent, which is very good.

However, I'm still not convinced by the cleaning power of the Ecoballs. Some smells and stains linger more than they would with the traditional method. And I can't get the tea towels clean in spite of soaking overnight in Ecover laundry bleach and then washing at 60 degrees.

I think the way forward might be a compromise between washing the less dirty stuff with Ecoballs, and the tougher stuff with soap.